Beginning to feel home

It's now been 30 days here in Budapest and I am really getting used to living here. It is first time I really live in a city and loving it! Everything is so near, for example this big shopping centre, gym, train station, metro, pubs and clubs. Do I miss anything from Finland? Well, not really. Maybe little bit the fresher air and the forests you can go for a run, but still the Margaret Island here is okay and the views just are magnificent so I am good right here. The only thing I really miss from Finland is the fresh fish. Of course it is obvious that here far in the mainland the fish isn't fresh anymore but this was something I just didn't think before. Maybe because in Finland I have just been so used to having fish desk in every grocery shop and buying something from them every week.

This week was just school, sports and recovering from the last weekends Kamikaze-trip. Thursday we went to register our football team to this 5 a side league and our first game will be on Monday 29.9. The organiser laughed and asked how it is possible that in a Spanish team there is also one Finnish guy :D I think the other teams are all just one nation teams or maybe there is some with a truly mix-nation teams so I kind of understand his question. But well, on monday he will see how it works ;) Though I am waiting for the games to start, still the best moment of next week will be when my girlfriend comes to visit me on Thursday. I am so happy she is coming :)

Yesterday I went to check out some pubs with three German guys. It was fun and we discovered quite  many places. We went for example to Szimpla kert(unfortunately didn't take myself any good pictures there, but i put a link to tripadvisor, really cool place there), Vittula(a cellar bar without anything fancy in it, but just some benches, cheap drinks, lots of texts and pictures on the walls and a nice, cosy atmosphere). Other places were not so special, sports bar where you can watch American football or a one where we played table football. Both of the places(and also Szimpla) were these bars in a courtyard, just like a tent over it. These bars have usually also many rooms with different music and atmosphere around the yard. This kind of pubs are really typical here in Budapest. Also the Morrison's 2, where many of the exchange students go on Mondays is a place like that.

A restaurant which was probably also a club, but we didn't wait to see what it would be later.

Klub Vittula and one of the walls

Next week I will have the first, no actually the first exam on Friday. Then I can tell more about the education and the quality of teaching and how difficult these exams are. This far I have been surprised and really wondering how do the people learn here. Only by reading themselves or what? The calculation 'practises' are really only a seminars where the teacher tells us the problem and then straight writes the answer to the blackboard. And most of the problems have been really simple. Last week there were few good lectures, for example Heat Transfer and Environmental Management of Energy, but at least two really ridiculously low points in teaching. First, at the Digital Pedagogy we use this Moodle system which is equal to my home University's system. The lecturer said that every week we need to read every week an article she will post there. She hasn't yet posted any article though its already 4. lesson coming and last lesson she told two who hasn't yet registered there to Moodle to do it(we were supposed to do this like two weeks ago!) and it took like 30 minutes for those to manage to do it. It was so ridiculous I was just reading the heat transfer course book all the time, but really! I don't think anyone learned anything from that. Rest of the lesson was okay, but the first half was just a waste of our time! Second low-point of the teaching was at Air Conditioining. We just went through wery simple equations and after it we calculated the heat losses for a room. The thing why it was awful was because we went so slowly and in the calculations the lecturer just stuck on to some uninterested and unimportant details and we used like 30 minutes just to calculate the dimensions of the room. Something every high school student could do also with the same standard with the instructions we were using. Well I hope it is going to change or at least the exams can't be really hard!

A nuclear reactor in our schools garden, how cool is that!